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The
young woman, a narrow new knife in the chair's fat old sheath, reads in
her edgy New York voice, a voice that leans toward Hope with a pressure
of anxiousness but also with what seems, in this shaky light of late life,
a kind of daughterly affection, "For a long time I have lived as a recluse,
fearing the many evidences of God's non-existence with which the world
abounds. The world, it has come to me slowly, is the Devil's motley, colorful
instead of pure. I restrict my present canvases to shades of gray ever
closer together, as if in the pre-dawn, before light begins to lift edges
into being. I am trying, it may be, to paint holiness. I suppose I should
be flattered when some critics call this phase my best--they write that
at last I am out from the shadow of my first husband. But I have, miraculously
it might be said, ceased to care what they think, or what figure I cut
in the eyes of strangers. End quote. This was five years ago. Would you
say it is still true?"
Hope tries to slow the young woman down, dragging her own voice as if
in thought. "True enough, I would say, though it does sound a shade self-dramatizing.
Perhaps 'fearing' is strong. 'Feeling dread and distaste in regard to'
might have been more accurate and-and seemly."
It makes a lump in Hope's throat to have this nervously aggressive intruder
here, with her city-white face and her dark-nailed long hands and her
doctrinairely black outfit-black turtleneck, black imitation-leather jacket
with a big center zipper, black hair held off her ears by a pair of curved
silver combs and falling in a loose and silky fan-shape down her back-finished
off so ominously with heavy square-toed footgear, combat boots of a sort,
laced up through a dozen or more eyelets like two little black ladders
ascending into the flared bottoms of her slacks, the slacks made of a
finely ribbed, faintly reflective fabric Hope has never seen before, a
fabric without a name. The boots, with that new kind of high heel, wide
sideways but narrow the other way, front to back, couldn't be very comfortable,
unless man- nishness was always comfortable now. It is a new century-more
appallingly yet, a new millennium. This millennial fact for Hope is a
large blank door that has slammed, holding her life behind it like a child
smothering in an abandoned refrigerator.
The visitor's voice, insistent with a certain anger yet femalely flexible,
insinuating itself into her prey's ear, asserts, "You were raised as a
Quaker."
"Well, 'raised' is a kind term for it. My grandfather was an elder, true,
but my father, especially after we moved to Ardmore, attended meeting
only once or twice a year. The Ouderkirks had been Dutch Quakers; Dutch
Quakers settled Germantown, a misnomer really, it should have been called
Dutchtown, just as the Pennsylvania Dutch should be properly Pennsylvania
Germans. Pockets of these Dutch Quakers had been living in the Rhine Valley;
the Ouderkirks came from Krefeld; Penn himself had visited them in the
sixteen seventies, telling them of his lovely colony, his 'holy experiment'
across the sea. When they first came over, in the sixteen eighties, some
lived in caves until they could build their houses. My mother, though,
was quite Episcopalian, typically lukewarm, but she would never have called
herself irreligious. We all went to meeting together a few times, it seems
like quite a few but in a child's mind a little does for a lot. I remember
mostly the light, and the silence, all these grown-ups waiting for God
to speak through one of them--suppressed coughs, shuffling feet, the creak
of a bench. It upset me at first, you know how children are always getting
embarrassed on behalf of adults. Then the quality of the silence changed,
it turned a corner, like an angel passing, and I realized it was a benign
sort of game. The Friends speak of 'living silence.' Actually, someone
did eventually speak. It had been arranged. The Quakers did make arrangements,
but left space for God, so to speak, to upset the arrangements. There
was a kind of elaborate courtesy to it all. Once there had been a bench
up front for the elders and recorded ministers, but by the time I remember,
the late 'twenties it must be, the very early 'thirties, I would have
been ten in 1932, the benches were arranged in a square, so no one had
any priority in the seating. Though my grandfather never led us to a back
bench."
Be quiet, Hope tells herself. This has ever been her fault, talking, giving,
flirting, trying too hard to please, endeavoring to seduce. Her grandfather
would use a Quaker phrase, "of the creature," for anything that was too
much, too human, too worldly, too selfish and cruel. War was of the creature.
Lust and intemperance of course, yet reason and excessive learning and
disputation, too. The arts--save for the domestic, Edenic art of gardening,
and the hidden art of making money--were of the creature, howls for recognition
and singularity. Things of the creature were weak and dirty and unworthy;
they were a form of noise. As a child Hope had chattered too much, feeling
her round freckled face redden with excitement, her heart nearly bursting
with its own beating, wanting within her ribs all of her, head to toes,
scalp to footsoles, to be loved, to be held, to be desired. Even now,
on the grave's edge, six weeks short of turning seventy-nine this coming
May, she is trying to charm the lithe black-clad stranger, charmless though
she herself has become, in her baggy brown corduroys and slack-necked
yellow cotton turtleneck and thick wool lumberjack shirt left untucked
as if to hide her belly but in truth calling attention to it; her belly
bulges but her breasts and buttocks are sunken, she has become beneath
her clothes a naked witch by Schongauer, with imps of arthritic pain her
familiars, or Rembrandt's dreamy Saskia several decades further lost in
sags and wrinkles. Her shiny auburn bangs, her signature when a young
woman, are not even gray now but white, so thinned and dry and lacking
in body, each filament sticking out with a mind of its own, as to be a
mere souvenir of what once covered her forehead with the smooth bulge
of a coppery cuirass. Her hair was cut short then, two points curving
in to touch the angles of her jaw, the wide jaw defining the pale pentagon
that looked back at her from a mirror with a deceptive calm, firm in its
freckled hazel gaze, the nose small and straight, the lips not quite full
but tidy and quick to express receptivity, to laugh, to smile, even at
herself so earnestly appraising her face in the mirror, a dimple leaping
up low in the left cheek. As a child she wondered where the reflection
went when she walked away; mirrors hung on the Germantown walls like paintings
that kept changing subject. The 'sixties liberated her from lipstick and
those frizzing 'forties and 'fifties perms as well as from girdles and
garters; she let her hair grow long and flat down her back, bundling it
into a quick ponytail to paint or do housework, she had all sorts of artful
clips and hinged round combs, tortoiseshell, and ivory before endangered
elephants became an issue. The gray ghost of this ponytail now is gathered
at the back of her skull in one of those candy- colored elastic circlets
they sell at the Montpelier five-and-ten (one of the few five-and-tens
left anywhere, they don't call it that, just the phrase dates her, a dime
gets you nothing now), and on her feet she has thick socks the color of
lint and cradling soft Birkenstocks, which date her also. The 'sixties
had been for her a grateful release, a joy, though she was in her forties
for most of them. Money worries, mating worries were behind her, she was
a Manhattanite with a horse farm in Connecticut, married to Guy Holloway,
Pop Art's super-successful boy wonder, and, more amusingly still, a mother
of three young children, pushing in her denim miniskirt and auburn bangs
a wire cart with little Dot in the infant seat in corduroy overalls (the
pocket a staring teddy bear or a round-eyed canary) and the two boys trailing
behind whining for this and that through the aisles of the Lexington Avenue
Gristede's, all those clustered consumeristic colors under the blazing
cool ceiling, such uninhibited col-ors, Day-Glo oranges and phosphorescent
greens and acid persimmons, a decade of brazen rainbows, of gold leaf
and silvering returning to canvases, of shimmering psychedelic trips.
Yet these interviewers always asked her about the dreary, fearful 'forties
and 'fifties, the first decade a gun-metal gray and the second that sickly
powder blue you can see in the washed-out 'fifties movies on television.
"Like your first husband's canvases," the voice proposes, pleased with
the connection. "Attacked from every side of the canvas. Without priority."
She is referring, Hope realizes, to the Quaker meeting house. "Zack wasn't
anything of a Quaker. He had no inner quiet, none. His mother, after Zack's
father left, had tried to enlist her family in one of those grotesque
Western sects, where they go up on high hills and expect the Lord to come
down and end everything. It was one of the things he didn't like to talk
about. One of the many things. He was still resentful."
"Resentful because he was made to go up, or because the Lord didn't come
down?"
This is amusing, Hope sees. This young woman perhaps does not need to
be utterly resisted. She is going on, her voice both spiky and silky:
"The lack of priority also suggests to me your paintings, the later ones.
Everything even, nothing too intense. Every square inch equally important."
"I've never made that connection," Hope tells her flatly. The flatness
would have been softened with the addition of the young woman's name.
Her name . . . What is the name she gave, in letters and e-mails that
Hope's gallery on Fifty-seventh Street forwarded and then over the phone
and finally at the door? There this living body was, incongruous with
the everlasting mountains behind her, startling, a tall black-haired person,
her face city-pale, in a purple cloak with a huge hood, like an apparition
of death in a Bergman film. Hope pictures the "K" jutting above the line,
the "y" swooping below it: Kathryn. That odd, mannered spelling. People
now that they've gotten away from ancestors and the Bible give the oddest
names, names they invent, black welfare mothers naming their dolls: Luceen,
Baylee, Maryvonne. Her own grandchildren, five of them and not a John
or a Mary among them, or even a Bill or a Barbara. Barbra now. Ardmore
and Shipley had been full of Barbaras, and Mary Anns. Hope wonders if
her visitor is Jewish. She has never developed the skill that anti-Semites
and Jews themselves have in spotting who is Jewish. In art circles you
assume anyone with any dash or presence is, any fast talker with a certain
tang to the consonants, sounding out that concluding "g," but even that
doesn't always work. Around Philadelphia the only Jews they knew were
their dentists; though Quakers and Jews had both been persecuted and were
closer to biblical religion than, say, Roman Catholics, they belonged
to different law firms, different country clubs. Hope's family belonged
to the Germantown Cricket Club, because unlike Merion Cricket Club it
had a swimming pool, though its dining room had that depressingly low
ceiling. There were whole mock-Tudor, fat-lawned, high-hedged enclaves
where invisible real-estate agents kept Jews out. Bernie Nova, for instance,
with his poseur's monocle and curling mustache with waxed tips, she thought
to be a German or an Armenian even, as the great and crazy Korgi truly
was. Bernie and Roger Merebien were the ones of Zack's crowd of competitors
she felt easiest with, most fraternally cherished; they were the most
articulate, writers of statements and letters to the editors, formulators
of credos and haughty letters to the press, and on account of that rather
condescended to by the others, by Zack and Phil and Seamus, as too glib
for sublimity, lacking in the proper American passion, beyond words. Kathryn's
skin has the matte lustre, the racial suppleness, but so much is makeup
now, she might also be of Mediterranean descent, or Eastern European.
We are all so assimilated. Last Saturday, Hope was watching the evening
news and the weekend newscaster instead of Tom Brokaw was a perfectly
stunning young woman, light topaz eyes as far apart as a kitten's, sharp-cornered
wide mouth pronouncing everything with a perfect rapid inflection, more
American than American, crisper, a touch of that rapid barking voice of
'thirties gangster films and romantic comedies, and when she signed off
her name wasn't even Greek, it was more like Turkish, a quick twist of
syllables like an English word spelled backward. The old American stock
is being overgrown. High time, of course: no reason to grieve. On the
contrary. She and Zack had been old stock-Quaker, Yankee, Western pioneer,
Protestant, each a priest on his or her own, out of the Northern European
mists to this land of sharp, cancer-inducing sun. "Kathryn," Hope says,
cementing her hold on the name, "is this really one more article about
Zack? Haven't there been too many already?"
"Not Zack, you. All of you. The moment, the historical moment, the explosion,
when everything came together, and America took over from Paris, and for
the first time ever we led world art. Why? How?" She sounds like a newscaster,
reading the prompter as it unscrolls. Hope's bones feel leaden, heavy
with the reality this young person is assigning her--needs to assign her,
to justify her time, her spent energy, the boring trip up the Thomas E.
Dewey Thruway on into Vermont, winding through the fading farms of cows
in stony pastures and the overbuilt developments of A-frame ski houses
and the pretty little experimental colleges for the difficult children
of the rich, the gas stations that are also mini-marts, the little lunch
restaurants trying to be homey with white curtains at the windows and
usually closed this time of year, and then the night of fitful sleep in
the motel so as to be at Hope's door by nine-thirty; Hope told her over
the phone her days began early, with some hours after dawn in the studio,
and ended early. The young woman fears not getting enough for her mileage.
That "all of you" was kind, though. Hope was never considered a significant
soldier, just a camp follower, one of the many, and then a wife, which
few camp followers achieve. Her painting embarrassed Zack, somehow a subversion
of his manhood, and he hid her as a painter upstairs like the mad Mrs.
Rochester. "Well," she offers, "to be simple about it, the war had left
the other countries ruined. They were exhausted. The same way we dominated
the '48 Olympics--everybody else was still weak with hunger."
Kathryn brushes this aside as facetious, as unworthy. She can't imagine
hunger and poverty as real cultural factors. Her face presses a few inches
deeper into the space between Hope and herself, she in the soft old sunroom
chair and Hope in her hard rocker, a rocker made by former hippies in
Burlington of no less, the nicely printed (in green ink) leaflet that
came with it said, than five different woods; they shrank at different
rates and made the fit tighter as the chair aged, so the leaflet claimed.
She had given the chair to Jerry for his first birthday up here and the
claim is not yet disproved. It supports her weight, as she leans back
to keep her inquisitor at a distance. The unkind clarity of the morning
light--not a cloud in the blue sky, a glisten of mud on the bare earth
outside the kitchen door when she had loaded up the bird feeder ten minutes
before Kathryn too punctually arrived--strips the interviewer's face of
beauty and shows it to be horsy and humorless, its plummy eyes astride
a long nose with a slight bump in it, its lips downturned in determination
not to be distracted or too easily charmed, lips that might melt if kissed
but are in danger of settling into a permanent sour frown of unfulfilled
ambition. Kathryn glances down into the sheets of paper balanced on her
black lap, her thin thighs pressed tightly together, pages of computer-typed
questions to help her as the interview tape unwinds in the little machine,
a Sony of two tones of gray, its purr tinny in the silence, on the low
table between them, not a table but an old wooden sea-chest Hope bought
in Riverhead in the 'forties for twenty dollars and sanded and varnished,
those first few years when she and Zack were enthusiastic about making
a home together on the light-soaked windy tip of Long Island, worlds removed
from what he called, euphemistically, covering his from-bar-to-bar binges,
the "wear and tear" of Manhattan. Kathryn says hurriedly, as if Hope were
sensitive to such matters, "The triumph was exploited, I know, politically,
by the Rockefellers and the CIA among others, but I don't see it as a
political movement, originally. I see it as innocent, the last flare of
our idealistic innocence."
"Oh dear," Hope responds. "We didn't feel innocent to ourselves. We felt
very sophisticated and a bit wicked. And the painters didn't all know
each other equally well, or should I say like each other equally. A number
of the others, the more intellectual and better organized, didn't like
Zack much, especially after his paintings became so famous and his drinking
became terrible again. Zack wasn't easy to like, or even, after a while,
to love." She lets that float a few seconds, tantalizing this other, tempting
her to pounce prematurely on that belly-up word "love," but Kathryn ignores
the provocation, and Hope has to continue, explaining, clarifying what
would have always been better left mysterious. Interviewers and critics
are the enemies of mystery, the indeterminacy that gives art life. She
flutters a hand-knobby, freckled, smelling of paint thinner--at the end
of her man's lumberjack--shirt sleeve and says, "Everybody now is expected
to turn inside out on command, like impatiens seeds when touched, or--what
is that plant called?--squirting cucumber. Zack hated being interviewed;
it offended his lower-class sense of dignity, of there being things one
didn't say. We all--me, Clem, Peggy, Betty, Herbie Forrest--used to coach
him on what to say, but when the time came he refused to say it, or mumbled
it. It was his arrogance--he thought you shouldn't chase recognition,
it should come to you without being asked. He was wild for it yet despised
playing the game." He is gropingly coming back to her, his squarish puzzled
bad-boy face, its three muscular dents, deep dimples as if in amplification--a
stronger restatement--of her own lone dimple, and with his face the look
of the Manhattan streets back then, before glass-skin architecture and
plastic garbage bags: the curbs of East Ninth Street crowded on collection
days with corroded galvanized trash cans, angrily dented on the dump truck's
hydraulically lifted lip, and the huge metal noise they made in the middle
of the night, the trash men getting their own back at all those sleeping
safe above them. The cans smelled plainly of garbage then, and class war
was unconcealed, unions versus management, the Reds against the rich.
You were not asked to have a nice day; buildings looked much the same
in Manhattan as in any city, brick and four stories high; each block formed
a little village, with a shoe repairman, a barber shop, a notions shop
run by a pair of sisters, a Chinese laundry, a coal-and-wood cellar, a
drugstore with a marble soda counter. Eighth Street was a kind of souk,
where you were jostled down into the gutter, and the area north and east
of Washington Square had a furtive European quality, Grace Church with
its waffle-pattern gray steeple presiding where Broadway slightly bent
like a medieval street sneaking along, and Cooper Union standing afloat
in its square like a brown Venetian palace. University Place was a string
of bars, including the Cedar, which when you opened the door always seemed
warm, and dim enough so that your defects were left outside. It smelled
of smoke and sawdust.
"He was," Hope says, halting, conscious of herself as the possessor, in
this other's pendulous black eyes, of a wandering, frayed old mind, beyond
any usefulness but some shreds of memory to be woven into another's story,
"he was self-indulgent and hardly even self-educated. And of course drank
too much. But we all drank too much, it was part of the war, the blackouts,
our desperate dingy mood, all that death, the newspapers dealing every
day in death, hundreds, thousands, numbers that would make screaming headlines
now. It was a man's world. Art was a man's world. They could hardly make
room for women, even when they married us. It was a tough, man's world.
You speak of Zack and the rest as heroes of this historic moment you have--what's
the word now?--constructed, you see them as Titans in the clouds, but
the Titans were a sad group actually, who came to a sorry end, if I remember
my childhood Bulfinch. Except for funny old Bernie, who had married money,
and Roger, who had a trust fund, and Onno, who began to sell before any
of the others--he had that European flair that dealers and buyers could
already understand, not our poor American groping, up from the depths,
Jung and all those archetypes--everybody was poor and had been for years,
living off the Project, the Federal Arts Project, before the war and even
during it, though the dole was drying up. At the moment you mention, post-war,
even after the publicity had begun to come in, Zack was still not selling
paintings. A few prints and works on paper but not the big paintings.
He was getting to be famous, but we stayed surprisingly poor--it maddened
him. Peggy's gallery gave Zack a dole, we had to borrow from her to buy
the house, a house and three acres for four thousand dollars, think of
it, the land alone would be a million now, out there close to the Hamptons;
he never earned it out, and so the gallery kept his paintings. Just kept
them, for years. Most people had no idea anything wonderful was happening.
They didn't know there was a moment. They were still thinking Picasso
and Mir� and the Surrealists. Not Dal�--he was as much despised as Benton,
standing for everything we hated."
"Of course," Kathryn murmurs, placatingly, sensing a kindling, wanting
Hope to run on.
"Dal� was a one-man circus, department-store window-dressing. He actually
did some windows for Bonwit's, and then fell through the glass tearing
up the display when the management insisted on putting clothes on the
mannequins, who were, I don't know, stepping into fur-lined bathtubs and
lying on beds of red coals, a lot of feathers and disembodied hands holding
mirrors. It made all the papers, which of course is what he wanted. He
understood publicity, and was shameless. Europeans are, when they get
over here. This was before I moved to New York, but Zack somehow had been
there and would describe it and laugh, but it also offended his sense
of dignity that an artist would sell out like that. Zack could be in rags,
filthy from a night in the gutter, but he had this ideal of dignity, of,
I don't know, the artist not as some performer and society leech but as
a worker, and at least as worthy of respect as a preacher or a banker.
It was one of the things about him I loved." Hope feels herself roused,
her face reddening, her heart pumping, striving to please, stung by the
fear of appearing doddery; the old deprivations and ridicule seem as close
as if this interloping girl had been one of the glib art journalists who
had served up easy wisecracks in the 'forties Time and Life. But by the
time these publications were taking any notice, a tide had turned. "You
speak about a historic moment, Kathryn, but the attention was all in a
few galleries, with a few critics, who had their own fish to fry for that
matter, their own names to make--Clem used Zack to make his own name,
and when Zack faltered Clem was the first one off the boat. The canvases,
the ones that later everybody could see were magnificent, and that went
for millions-what good were they? They were too big. They were public
art without a public. Zack--it was pathetic--when he was in his cups used
to tell people what a great investment his work would be, and of course
he was right. One man in the Flats--Jimmy Quinn, who ran what was really
a glorified vegetable stand--took a little thirty-by-forty fiberboard
of Zack's in payment and ten years or so ago finally sold it for two million
dollars. He still drives around in his beat-up pickup. Zack would have
liked that."
Hope pauses, and Kathryn's lips part to spit another question into the
tape, but Hope is not done with her long, looping thought; there is a
picture of Zack she wants to finish, though the memory of him threatens
to suck her back, out, down, like waves foaming at her ankles at one of
the beaches, one of the remote rocky ones past the bluffs, past the old
fish-factories, toward the Point, where they would stand as the afternoon
gave up its strong light and turned ruddy and the breeze picked up, there
being nothing to the south but the Atlantic, a few gray ships on the horizon
like index tabs in a filing cabinet. "We all drank," she repeats, "but
for Zack it was a poison, it released demons. Like many a famous drinker,
he really couldn't drink. I held my liquor better than he did, and I was
just a slip of a thing in my twenties." Zack was in his thirties when
they first went together: his narrow hips, his chest and shoulders coated
with blond wool, even his bare feet were beautiful, knobby and broad across
the toes, and the insteps as white as the skin inside a woman's arm. She
stood beside him feeling the suck of ankle-high surf, the way it pulls
the sand out from under your heels. There had been the white noise of
the waves and the far-stretching scent of beach, salt and iodine and rotting
marine bodies, fish and jellyfish leaving their round ochre corpses like
puddles of varnish on the rocks, collapsed, unable to get back to their
element, their anatomy dimly seen within the puddle, useless, wasted,
something like breathing still taking place, poor doomed creatures, so
we all. She had liked the way Zack was not too much taller than she, like
some men, including Ruk; she felt like an Eve matched to him, as in those
marvellous Cranach panels in Pasadena, or the two frescoes in the Brancacci
Chapel, the Masaccio so anguished and ashamed, the red angel over their
heads banishing them, and the Masolino so serene and stately and haughty,
the little benign female snake's head above Eve's, Eve cool with her centrally
parted fair hair, unrepentant, before the Fall, the cleft of her sex not
hidden, nor Adam's penis. Face it: this young woman, too, is beautiful.
Hope imagines Kathryn's naked body-the swing of hip into thigh, the rose-madder-tipped
breasts floating on the rib cage, the pubic triangle pure ivory-black
and oily as in a Corot--all in a flash, then renounces the image: of the
creature. Her susceptibility to beauty, Hope has always known, is what
has kept her minor as an artist. The great ones go beyond beauty, they
spurn it as desert saints spurned visions of concupiscence and ease: the
Devil's offer of the world as reward.
Excerpted from Seek My Face by John Updike Copyright�
2002 by John Updike. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random
House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced
or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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